Racism is not simply black and white

For some time now, there has been a divergence between the
images of racism in research and those that lie behind much
anti-racist policy and activism. Many opposed to racism see it in a
very simplistic fashion: racists are always white and bad and their
victims are always not so white and good. The limited nature of
this stance clearly shows in the poverty of the reactions to the
Cronulla violence.

Anti-racism in Australia needs to re-invent itself, whether it
aims for the difficult goal of getting through to racists, to
invite them to reflect on the negative effect of their actions, or
the easier but just role of helping to formulate policy that limits
the capacity of racists to hurt their victims.

Racists are not one-dimensional, evil people. They can be good
people too, and often are. Not many people engaging in racism see
themselves in the image of our dominant negative stereotypes of
what a racist should be like: a sleazy white supremacist, a violent
skinhead or a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.

Often the reverse is true: racists feel morally righteous and
justified in having the attitude towards certain others that they
have. But even when they don't, racists remain human beings and
their weaknesses are the weaknesses of all of us as human
being.

They are not some breed apart as anti-racist moralisers make
them out to be. Beside being incorrect, the portrayal of racists as
villains is inefficient as an anti-racist strategy. It disallows,
for example, the possibility of communication with people who
simply do not feel themselves to be villains at all. Furthermore,
such a conception of racists works to stop people from seeing
racism in the most obvious places. This has been the case in some
of the commentaries on the Cronulla events.

There are those who argue that, on the whole, the crowd that
assembled on the beach was not racist because only a handful among
them were genuine wog-haters. The others were just average young
blokes who wanted to make a point.

So, to qualify as racist, a crowd should be full of very nasty
people. This is used to pull out the trick of convincing us that
the very obvious fact - that the Cronulla crowd looked and acted
like any other racist crowd in history before it - is not obvious
at all, since there were lots of good people on the beach that day
who just wanted to make a point. Anti-racists should not be saying:
"No they weren't nice people - they were racists." They should be
saying: "Yes, there were nice people among them, but this does not
make the crowd any less racist."

Along with the division of people as good and bad lies a common
anti-racist conception of racism as always white. This is also far
from the truth: everybody can be racist. White people of a European
background do not have a monopoly on racist beliefs and attitudes;
it is a feature of all cultures.

But there is a difference between racism as a negative portrayal
of people and racism as a power to do negative things. While
everybody can have racist beliefs, not everybody has the power to
act on their beliefs.

This is where white racism derives its historical importance.
White people, historically speaking, have been in a position of
power so that they have been able to act on their racism more so
than others. If white racism has had the power to discriminate and
shape society more than others, this does not mean that non-white
racism has had no effect at all. Indeed, the victims of racism
themselves are not necessarily good. Just because one is a victim
of racism does not make one virtuous.

Victims of racism can be racists themselves. Anti-racists should
recognise and be able to tackle cases where non-whites are
discriminating against others. These could be minor cases where
non-white owners of small firms discriminate against white job
seekers, or more important and violent cases such as the
Lebanese-background rapists targeting what they have classified as
Australian girls. If they fail to tackle such cases, anti-racists,
whether they are activists or legislators, will appear to be
morally singling out white people who will feel treated as if they
have a disease no one else has.

The non-recognition of racism by minority groups by anti-racists
has left the way open for its strategic use by majority racists. In
Australia, a number of media commentators and politicians,
prejudiced against certain minority groups, are using the fact that
such groups have racist tendencies and racist individuals among
them to legitimise the racism of the majority towards them. We need
to keep the racism of the minorities in check, because they can
still hurt people, because minorities can become majorities, and
because those who are minorities in one place can be a majority in
another. Nevertheless, emphasising racism of minority groups cannot
be done at the expense of ignoring the racism of the majority.

The idea of not seeing that there are Lebanese/Muslim forms of
racism that exist in Australia and that need to be dealt with
seriously is naive at best. But the idea of equalising between the
Cronulla riots and Lebanese racism is equally ridiculous, when it
is not simply mischievous. In terms of world history it is the
racism of the majority, not that of the minorities, that has led to
the most evil racist situations known to us: slavery, apartheid and
the Holocaust.

One of the greatest political theorists who has worked on racism
is the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. She emphasised that
racists do not come to us clothed as monsters: she called this the
banality of evil.

But what is particularly evil about racism is that its
ordinariness and banality can transform very rapidly and before we
know it into a Grand Evil such as mass extermination. Our era is
generating such lopsided logics, and the state of anti-Muslim
animosity that is being legitimised and routinised is such that it
is not far-fetched to imagine ourselves engaging in the racist mass
incarceration or even extermination of Muslims on the grounds that
they are racists. This is one among many reasons anti-racists need
to sharpen their tools.

Ghassan Hage teaches anthropology at the University of Sydney
and is the author of Against Paranoid Nationalism: searching for
hope in a shrinking society (Pluto Press).

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